When you started your blog, you probably had visions of hitting some major milestones, like 1,000 readers a month, or 10,000, or even 100,000. But with 4.4 million blogs written every day, many aspiring bloggers find themselves writing regularly but not really getting the number of readers they were hoping for. How do you fix that? Here are three strategies that may help.
1. Work on retaining the readers you do have.
It’s going to be very hard to increase your readership if you don’t somehow figure out how to retain people coming to your site. Of course, the best retention method is having great content that keeps people coming back despite all hurdles.
But more realistically, you want to collect the contact info of your readers and get them to subscribe to your newsletter or follow you on social media, where you can send out alerts whenever a new blog posts. There’s a variety of ways to do this, including everything from giving away a longer piece of free content in trade for the information, to the dreaded and oft-misunderstood pop up. Before you make any big efforts to get more readers, make sure that when the hordes to come to your site, you’ll be able to hang on to them.
2. Rethink your content mix.
It’s possible that your blog is a masterpiece and just has not been discovered because you have no readers. More likely, though, is that while you know the broader subject that you want to cover, you have not yet found your precise niche. If you had, you’d probably have a steady stream of readers trickling in, and their numbers would be growing.
With some many blogs around these days, the key thing to think about is differentiation — for example, if you’re running a blog about financial independence, what makes your blog worthwhile to read over the other 10,000 blogs on the same topic? It’s actually worthwhile to put writing off for a bit, and do some market research. Things to think about include:
Who are the biggest names in your field? What is their method? Are there parts of it you can replicate for your own success? What segments of readership are they missing, and how can capture this audience?
What are the biggest sources of traffic for blogs like yours? Does your content lend itself to being found in this way? Which is to say, if people are landing on your page from Google, is your content designed so that it would come up as a search result to something your ideal audience would be searching for?
3. Treat your blog like a business.
Most successful bloggers aren’t just writers; they’re entrepreneurs. As with any business, you should make a growth plan that you can follow. You should evaluate how you’re doing on a quarterly basis, and plan blog topics out well ahead of time as well. You should be posting regularly, and preferably train your audience to expect posts from your on certain days of the week; you should not be writing so frequently that the quality of the content suffers. If you really want your blog to succeed, you may want to consider paying for advertising. While this might feel like you’re paying to get readers, sometimes it’s a matter of getting your blog to reach a critical mass, after which it will grow on its own.
We hope these tips have been helpful to you in thinking about how to take your website’s blog to the next level.
